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Book Reviewed by:From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.
Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre and troubling effect. Her depictions of a happily unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman convinced she is an alien in Earthlings have endeared her to millions of readers worldwide. Vanishing World takes Murata's universe to a bold new level, imagining an alternative Japan where attitudes to sex and procreation are wildly different to our own.
As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents "copulated" in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange "system" by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage—sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest—Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only "Kodomo-chan." Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?
Excerpt
Vanishing World
As I grew into adulthood I continued to fall in love with both real and nonreal people.
When I was old enough, I wanted to leave home as soon as possible, but it was hard to make a living without a proper job, and my mother didn't seem in any hurry for me to leave. I finally managed to leave home after I finished college and found a job.
I was hired by a company that supplied construction materials, like onsite scaffolding, working in their office in an old building in Nihonbashi, central Tokyo. Once I'd got used to the work, I started wanting to have a baby, and so at age twenty-five I married a man I met at a matchmaking party.
However, our relationship didn't last long, and we soon got divorced.
We had taken both our jobs into consideration and planned for me to be artificially inseminated on my twenty-eighth birthday. He was properly set up with a long-term lover, and our respective lovers both came to congratulate us at our wedding ceremony.
He had always liked to...
Murata leaves it to the reader to work through their own judgements about the new ways of living that this sci-fi technology, combined with changed social mores, has ushered in... Murata crafts a sense of quiet unease; her matter-of-fact prose barely belies the disturbing world she's created, absent of the love, intimacy, and emotion that readers associate with family and parenting. And yet Vanishing World regularly reminds the reader that society is constantly evolving, and that we adapt to its changes...continued
Full Review
(717 words)
(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
In her novel Vanishing World, Sayaka Murata presents an alternate version of the present, in which most children are conceived either via artificial insemination or using newly available artificial wombs, which are sack-like external devices strapped to the body of a parent that allows them to carry a child without undertaking the risks of pregnancy or childbirth. This scenario may sound like something firmly out of the world of science fiction, but artificial wombs are indeed in the advanced stages of development—although the reality is somewhat different than the version imagined by Murata.
Unlike in Vanishing World, real-life artificial wombs are not yet intended to replace human conception. Instead, it is hoped they will provide ...
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